Living in China and not drinking great tea everyday is like living in France and buying bagged bread – then eating it with cheese wrapped by the slice. A world of mildly caffeinated taste and pleasure awaits, at unbeatable prices. Please do run out and buy some right now.

Back? Good. Oops, forgot to mention the teapot. Making tea in anything less than a genuine yixing [say it with me now: yee – shing] teapot is like drinking pinot out of a McDonald’s soda cup. Tea is the distillation of Mother Nature’s love for us. Hot water is the medium, and yixing clay teapots are the ultimate vessels in which to mingle dried plant and hot water.

The Yixing region lies a little over a hundred kilometers northwest of Shanghai, in Jiangsu Province, and is truly the Good Earth. The clay teapots first began to gain kingdom-wide fame for quality during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). High official and humble scholar alike praised the yixing teapot for its wholesome beauty, stripped of all artifice. Indeed, thanks to the abundant silica, magnesium, and iron content in the clay, the pots naturally took on lustrous hues of purple, buff, and cinnabar red. The clay needed no glazing to look luminous, a felicitous circumstance, since it allowed the clay to breathe better, resulting in a better pot of tea.

But that’s just the beginning of the yixing teapot’s superior qualities. Infinitely porous yet resilient, yixing clay retains both flavor and heat. An unusually low rate of shrinkage means that a skilled potter can fashion a perfectly sealing lid to further retain heat and prevent over-oxidation the brew inside.

These qualities outstrip those of any other mankind has yet produced in a teapot. Now consider the fact that yixing teapots are free of lead, arsenic, any of those icky by-products of mass production. The ancients knew nothing of this benefit, yet still had enough regard for the clay to make it yet another venerable aspect of Chinese culture, by fashioning the teapots into a million different shapes. Some seem to have sprung from rock or tree; some imitate the shape of animals; some are abstract and whimsical. Any tea market or shop will have a plethora for sale, and all are worth perusing. A word of warning: one in five who spends ten minutes gazing at yixing teapots becomes a lifelong collector. The other four succumb more slowly.